Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Dorothea Puente

“Sewer Problems”

The stench hovered over the Sacramento
neighborhood like a putrid fog, sickly sweet and pungent. Everyone knew
where it came from – the yard of the pale blue Victorian at 1426 F
Street , where Dorothea Puente rented out rooms to elderly and infirm
boarders.

During the summer it got so bad that some
neighbors preferred to turn off their air conditioners and suffer the
blazing Delta heat rather than have the fans suck the stench into their
homes.

“The sewer’s backed up,” the 59-year-old
boardinghouse mistress told people when they complained. Other times
she blamed rats rotting under the floorboards or the fish emulsion
she’d used to fertilize the garden.

Dorothea Puente

She tried to blot out the fetor by
dumping bags of lime and gallons of bleach into the yard and spraying
her parlor with lemon-scented air freshener when guests dropped in. But
no matter what she tried, the stench refused to fade; it clung to the
boardinghouse like a curse.

When her boarders started disappearing, a
concerned social worker tipped off police, who made a gruesome
discovery: Seven bodies buried in the garden.

Not long afterward, Puente appeared in
court, accused of murdering her tenants so she could steal their
government benefit checks and buy herself luxuries ranging from fancy
clothes to a face lift.

This is a story of keeping up
appearances. Dorothea Puente tried hard to project a polished exterior
with cosmetic surgery and tailored clothes. She also projected herself
as a upstanding member of Sacramento society, a small-time socialite
who gave to charity and rubbed elbows with second-tier politicians.

No one suspected that the sweet-faced,
grandmotherly Puente was systematically drugging and killing her frail
boarders and burying their remains in the yard she so lovingly tended.
With her careful exterior, she got away with murder for years.

Beef Jerky

Dorothea Puente’s home

The two-story, pale blue house stood on a
quiet, tree-lined street of similar gingerbread Victorians. Although
the neighborhood was once the ritzy section of the state capital – the
former governor’s mansion is two blocks away – it had fallen into
disrepair and many of the once-stately homes were boarded up or used as
flop houses.

On the morning of November 11, 1988,
Detective John Cabrera and a couple of colleagues visited 1426 F Street
looking for Alvaro “Bert” Montoya, a mentally-retarded tenant whose
social worker had reported him missing, according to the Sacramento Bee
.

Alvaro “Bert” Montoya

As they approached the high black iron
fence surrounding the house, they noted it was strung with Christmas
tree lights, and that lace curtains hung in the windows. The men
knocked on the front door and asked Puente if they could have a look
around.

“Go ahead,” she said.

The interior of the house was cluttered
with old lady knick knacks – miniature vases and porcelain dolls and
doilies, writes William Wood in The Bone Garden – but they didn’t
immediately notice anything out of the ordinary.

The Bone Garden

They did in the backyard, however. At the
southeast corner of the property, the ground had been recently
disturbed; the men returned to their cars to retrieve the shovels and
spades they’d brought on a hunch.

They began digging, and quickly turned up
what looked like shreds of cloth and beef jerky. When their efforts
were hampered by what appeared to be a tree root, Cabrera whacked and
jabbed it with his shovel. It didn’t budge, so he decided to climb down
into the hole and get his hands dirty.

“I wrapped my hand around it, braced my
feet and started pulling,” Cabrera later told the Sacramento Bee . “I
pulled so hard that it broke loose, and when I pulled it up, I could
see the joint. It was a bone…at that time, I was airborne and out of
the hole.”

The Bone Yard of Dorothea Puente

Hearing the commotion, Puente walked into
the corner of the yard and peered down into the hole herself. When
Cabrera told her that they’d found what appeared to be a human corpse,
she acted shocked and slapped her palms to the sides of her face.

Corner of Dorothea Puente’s home

The men stopped digging when they found a
shoe with a piece of foot still wedged in it and decided to return the
next day with proper equipment.

The next morning, a Saturday, a team of
forensic anthropologists, officials from the coroner’s office, and a
county work crew equipped with heavy machinery descended on the
property.

The first person they dug from the yard
was the body the officers had stumbled across the day before, a small
female with gray hair that had rotted into a skeleton.

A crowd of onlookers and reporters
watched the proceedings from the other side of the high fence, the Los
Angeles Times reported. Boys shimmied up trees for a better view. The
mood was party-like until a fresh body was unburied and carried to the
coroner’s wagon, and the crowd grew solemn.

As the team drilled through a slab of
concrete and prepared to excavate beneath it, Puente walked into the
yard and approached Cabrera, wearing a cherry red overcoat, and purple
pumps, and carrying a pink umbrella.

She asked the detective if she was under
arrest. He said “No.” She asked if she could go to the Clarion Hotel – a
few blocks away — to have a cup of coffee, and he said, “yes,”
escorting her past the reporters and curious onlookers before returning
to the yard work.

In rapid succession, the team found three
bodies under the slab of cement and a fifth under a gazebo in the side
yard, the Sacramento Bee reported.

But by the time authorities noticed that
the white-haired landlady hadn’t returned from the hotel, four hours
had passed, and Dorothea Puente was hundreds of miles away.

Puente’s Grim Harvest

Ultimately, the grisly harvest of
Puente’s garden would be seven people who had checked into her boarding
house and never checked out alive:

Alvaro “Bert” Montoya, 51, a retarded
schizophrenic who argued in Spanish with the voices inside his head and
called Puente “Mama,” found under a newly planted apricot tree in the
side yard.

Dorothy Miller, 64, an American Indian
with a drinking problem who liked to recite poems about heartbreak,
found with her arms taped to her chest with duct tape. The last time
her social worker saw her, she was sitting on the front porch, enjoying
a cigarette.

Benjamin Fink, a 55-year-old alcoholic
found dressed in striped boxer shorts. Shortly before he disappeared,
in April, 1988, Puente told another boarder that she was going to “take
Ben upstairs and make him feel better.”

Dorothy Miller

Betty Palmer, 78, whose remains - missing
the head, hands and lower legs - were found in a sleeveless white
nightgown below a statue of St. Francis de Assisi, a few feet from the
sidewalk at the front of the house.

Betty Palmer

Leona Carpenter, also 78, who was
discharged from the hospital to Puente’s care in February 1987 and had
spent several weeks agonizing on a sofa before disappearing. She was
buried near the back fence, and it was her leg bone that Detective
Cabrera mistook for a tree root.

James Gallop

James Gallop, a 62-year-old who survived a heart attack and brain tumor surgery, but not Dorothea Puente.

Vera Faye Martin

Vera Faye Martin, 64, whose wristwatch was still ticking when she was unearthed.

Taste of Death

Excavation of the garden

The bodies were all severely decayed, and
in several cases the internal organs had melded together into a
leathery mass. Handling the rancid bodies and other items from the
crime scene proved too much for police clerk Joy Underwood, who was
sent to the morgue one night to help a technician label the evidence.

She told Associated Press that afterward,
she vomited every time she saw a news report about the case and began
to shower compulsively, feeling like she could never get clean.

I still have the taste of death in my
mouth,” she told reporters. “I can’t eat vegetables grown in the ground
because they have dirt around them, like the people dug up in Puente’s
yard – and I’m a vegetarian.”

Remains removed from yard

In his book, Wood writes that Puente
indulged her champagne tastes with her dead tenants’ income. When she
was arrested, her face was still unnaturally tight from a face lift,
and in her room, detectives found $110 bottles of Giorgio perfume and
silk chiffon dresses.

Details of the case emerged slowly.
Puente had been renting out the first story of the Victorian to old and
alcoholic boarders and using the second story as her living quarters.

A search of the boardinghouse had turned
up a note on which Puente had scrawled the first initial of each victim
and the amount she was getting from forging their disability and
Social Security checks, the Sacramento Bee reported. Before her arrest,
she was making $5,000 a month off her dead tenants, the paper
reported.

Dorothea Puente Ran a Tight Ship

By all accounts, Puente ran a tight ship.
Boarders paid $350 a month for a private room and two hot meals a day:
breakfast at 6:30 a.m. and dinner at 3:30 p.m. Puente was an
accomplished cook, preparing gut-busting breakfasts of pancakes, bacon
and eggs. But if residents missed either meal, they went hungry. They
weren’t allowed to enter the kitchen at odd hours.

They also weren’t allowed to touch the
phone or the mail. Puente chewed residents out on more than one
occasion for daring to touch the mail, Carla Norton writes in Disturbed
Ground .

Disturbed Ground

And while Puente kept a well-stocked bar for herself upstairs, drinking by residents was strictly forbidden.

In the evening, she made excursions to
seedy liquor joints like Harry’s Lounge, where she’d sidle up to
solitary old men, ply them with drinks, and ask about their finances.
If she thought enough of their income, she’d invite them to move into
her boarding house.

“She asked me where I got my money from,
where I was working,” Harry’s regular John Terry, 67, told the State
Journal-Register . “About every time she would see me, she’d hit me up
about it, wanting me to move in.”

Terry refused, and lived to tell the tale.

The Gentle Side of Dorothea Puente

In interviews, people gave conflicting descriptions of Puente’s personality.

John Sharp, 64, a retired cook who lived
in the boarding house for 11 months until police shut the place down,
told reporters that Puente had a gentle side – she fed stray cats, gave
her boarders clothes and cigarettes, and even bought one disabled
tenant an adult tricycle so he could be more mobile, according to the
Associated Press.

The media feeding frenzy was enormous,
with every news organization looking for a unique angle. When neighbors
told reporters that Puente passed out tamales at Christmas time, the
National Enquirer wanted to know if the meat in the tamales tasted
funny.

The LA Times tracked down Patty Casey, a
54-year-old cab driver who ferried Puente around town and eventually
became a friend who visited Puente at the boarding house. Casey told
the paper that she drove Puente on errands several times a week to buy
cement, plants or fertilizer or dropped her off at various dive bars in
downtown Sacramento .

Puente confessed secrets to the cabbie,
saying she was really 71, and not 59, as the records indicated, and
telling her about her four failed marriages and her recent face lift.

“I thought she was a nice person,” Casey
told the paper. “I really looked up to her and admired her. I felt I
could learn a few things from her. I thought she was very savvy.”

When Casey commented on the unpleasant
odor permeating the house, Puente told her it came from dead rats that
were rotting under the floorboards.

The police were also interviewing former
boarders, and certain patterns that became evident. Several times
before a tenant disappeared, for example, Puente would tell someone
that so-and-so wasn’t feeling well and that she was “taking them
upstairs to make them feel better.”

And she always had excuses for the
disappearances: one tenant was becoming burdensome and “telling her how
to run her house,” so she’d packed his stuff into cardboard boxes in
the middle of the night and threw them on the street; another left
suddenly to live with relatives.

Dorothea Puente as a Lifelong Criminal

Under the guise of the benevolent
grandmother lurked a lifelong criminal, and diligent reporters
carefully pieced Puente’s life story together and published it.

She was born Dorothea Helen Gray on
January 9, 1929 in Redlands, California, and although she claimed to be
the youngest of 18 children, her birth certificate showed she was her
mother’s sixth child, the Sacramento Bee reported.

Hers was a childhood marred by tragedy,
with her father dying of tuberculosis when she was 8 and her mother
dying in a motorcycle accident a year later.

Her relatives told the Bee that the Gray
children were farmed out to different homes and according to census
records, she lived in the city of Napa at age 13. School records show
she was a student in Los Angeles at 16, but less than a year later, she
moved to Olympia , Washington , where she called herself “Sheri,” and
worked in a milkshake parlor during the summer of 1945.

She met Fred McFaul, a 22-year-old
solider back from the war in the Philippines , that fall, Wood writes.
She and a friend were living in a motel room – and turning tricks there
as prostitutes.

“She was a good-looking female,” McFaul told the Bee. “She knew how to make a buck when she wanted to.”

Dorothea Puente in orange jumpsuit

When the couple were married in Reno a
few months later, the 16-year-old Puente said she was 30 and called
herself “Sherriale A. Riscile,” information duly recorded on the
marriage certificate.

McFaul soon found out that Puente was an
inveterate liar. Not only did she love to adorn her body with expensive
clothes – silk stockings and flirty dresses – she also loved to
embellish her background. When she was young, she lied to make herself
seem more interesting, and it was a habit that stuck for life. Sources
close to her said she claimed to have lived through the Bataan Death
March in World War II (when she was 13), and the bombing of Hiroshima.
She was the sister of the ambassador to Sweden , she told people, and a
close friend of Rita Hayworth.

McFaul and Puente set up house in
Gardnerville , Nevada and had two daughters. Shortly after the birth of
their second daughter, McFaul told the Bee , Puente went to Los
Angeles . She became pregnant several months later.

She miscarried the baby, Norton writes,
but McFaul left her anyway, and the couple’s daughters were raised by
other people – one by McFaul’s mother, and the other adopted by
strangers.

Easy Money

The easy money she got from hooking was a hard habit for Puente to shake.

In 1948, she stole checks from an
acquaintance to buy a hat, purse, shoes and panty hose. She was
convicted of forgery, served four years in jail, then skipped town when
she was on probation.

In 1952, she married her second husband,
Axel Johansson. Johansson was a merchant seaman, Norton writes, and
when he returned from long absences, he’d sometimes find other men
living with his wife. Neighbors complained of taxis dropping off
strange men at all hours of the night. The couple fought, separated,
made up, separated, and remained married for 14 more years.

In 1960, she was convicted of residing in
a Sacramento brothel. She told authorities she was just visiting a
friend, and didn’t know it was a whorehouse, according to reports.

In 1968, Puente, 39, opened a halfway
house for alcoholics called “The Samaritans,” and married 21-year-old
Robert Jose Puente. The couple argued constantly, and the marriage
ended a year later, as did the halfway house when she ran up a $10,000
debt, the Bee reported.

Soon afterward, she moved into, and began
managing, the boarding house located at 21 st and F streets in
Sacramento , and in 1976, she married one of the tenants, Pedro Angel
Montalvo, 52.

“She wanted new pantyhose every day,” Montalvo told the Bee . “She thought she was rich.”

In 1978, she was convicted of forging 34
checks she’d stolen from her tenants, the Los Angeles Times reported.
She served five years on probation and was ordered to undergo
counseling; a psychiatrist who interviewed her diagnosed her as a
schizophrenic and a “very disturbed woman.”

Deadly Fiancée

Authorities alleged that Puente committed
her first murder in the spring of 1982, when 61-year-old Ruth Munroe
died of a drug overdose shortly after she moved into 1426 F Street with
Puente, bringing all her earthly belongings and $6,000 in cash.

Ruth Munroe

Munroe was Puente’s business partner in a
small lunchroom business, according to the Bee , and she’d written her
husband — who was terminally ill and residing at a Veterans
Administration Hospital – that she was excited about the partnership
and optimistic about the future.

But a scant two weeks after she’d moved
in, she ran into a friend at a beauty parlor and blurted out: “I feel
like I’m going to die.” When the friend asked her why, according to the
reports, Munroe told the woman, “I don’t know.”

Three days later, Munroe was dead of a
massive overdose of Tylenol and codeine. The coroner wrote it off as
suicide, not having enough evidence to classify it as a homicide.

A month later, however, Puente was
arrested and charged with drugging four elderly people and stealing
their valuables. One of the victims, a 74-year-old-man, told the
Sacramento Bee that Puente doped him, then looted his home as he
watched in a stupor, unable to speak or move.

A judge sentenced Puente to five years in
the California Institution for Women at Frontera. She was released
after three years, in 1985, and ordered to stay away from the elderly
and to not “handle government checks of any kind issued to others,”
according to the Los Angeles Times.

Black Widow

But she’d already violated this parole
condition in prison, when she started corresponding with a 77-year-old
pen pal from Oregon named Everson Gillmouth, who made the mistake of
telling Puente he earned a cozy pension and owned a Airstream trailer.

Everson Gillmouth

When Puente was given her walking ticket,
Gillmouth was there to pick her up. He drove her to 1426 F Street ,
the place Puente resided before she was sent to prison. Gillmouth had
told his sister he was going to marry Puente, and he’d made her a
signatory on his checking account.

Not long afterward, his body was dumped
unceremoniously along the Sacramento River in a homemade coffin wrapped
in plastic and surrounded by mothballs. Three months after she killed
Gillmouth, Puente sent a “thinking of you” card to his sister in an
attempt to cover her tracks.

The pensioner’s body rotted in silence by
the Sacramento river until January 1986, when a fisherman found his
plywood coffin. His remains would remain unidentified for three more
years in the city morgue while his fiancée continued her killing spree.

Sins of Omission

When the owner moved out of 1426 F Street
, Puente took over, subletting the 1 st floor rooms for cheap and
taking over the second story for herself. Soon, social workers came
calling, seeking to place their homeless clients with her.

Puente never told them about her five
felony convictions for drugging and robbing the elderly, and they never
did their homework.

A former social worker told the Bee she
put 19 seniors in Puente’s care between 1987 and 1988, because
“Dorothea was the “best the system had to offer.”

Peggy Nickerson said Puente accepted the
hardest clients to place – the drug and alcohol addicts, the people who
were physically or verbally abusive. But Nickerson stopped sending
clients her way when she overheard Puente cussing out one of them.
She’d later learn that four of her clients ended up buried in Puente’s
yard.

The system that let these fragile members
of society fall through the cracks was predictably fustigated in the
wake of Puente’s arrest.

An independent county agency published a
reported titled “Sins of Omission,” which criticized the Sacramento
Police Department’s handling of the case as well as another 10 public
and private agencies that had dealings with the boarding house, the Bee
reported.

It seemed inconceivable that federal
parole agents, who visited Puente 15 times during the two years leading
up to her arrest, never realized she was running a boarding house for
the elderly — in direct violation of her parole.

Escape to L.A.

On the second day of digging, when police
let Puente walk to the nearby Clarion Hotel – ostensibly for a quick
cup of coffee – she fled. She called a cab from the hotel, which took
her to a bar on the other side of town. There, according to Wood, she
chugged down four vodkas and grapefruit, before catching another taxi
to Stockton , where she boarded a bus to Los Angeles . During the
six-hour bus ride, she had a numbing buzz, $3000 cash in her purse, and
a burning desire to reinvent herself.

A few days later, Charles Willgues, a
59-year-old retired carpenter, was nursing a mid-afternoon beer at the
Monte Carlo tavern in downtown Los Angeles when an elegant stranger in a
bright red overcoat took a stool next to him.

She ordered a vodka and orange juice and
introduced herself to Willgues as Donna Johansson, a Sacramento woman
whose husband had died the month before and who was looking to begin a
new life in L.A. The grieving widow told Willgues that she’d gotten off
to a poor start: The cabbie who’d dropped her off at the $25-a-night
Royal Viking Motel had driven off with her suitcases, and to make
matters worse, the heels of her only remaining pair of shoes – she
leaned back in her bar stool to flash a bit of ankle and the purple
pump at him — were broken.

Willgues felt sorry for the woman and
took her shoes to a cobbler across the street to have them repaired.
When he returned, the woman asked him how much money he got from Social
Security a month, the Los Angeles Times reported. He didn’t think her
question was particularly nosy, so he told her – $576 a month.

He did think it strange, however, when
the stranger told him she was a good cook and suggested they move in
together. They were two lonely souls in the world, she said, so why not
keep each other company?

“I’ve got all I can handle right now,” he
responded, taking another long drink of beer, and changing the
subject. They went for a chicken dinner at a fast food joint, and
Willgues kept wondering why the stranger seemed so familiar. In the
early evening, they parted ways after making plans to go shopping the
next day and replace the items the cabbie had stolen.

Back at his apartment, Willgues figured
out who she was. He’d seen her on television, along with the bodies
they’d pulled from her yard. A chill ran through him. He called a local
TV station, which in turn called the police.

“I’m just very thankful that the relationship didn’t go any further,” Willgues told the Times .

Dorothea Puente arrested

At 10:40 p.m., Los Angeles police
surrounded the fleabag motel where Puente was staying, and arrested her
without incident. During the flight back to Sacramento , she told a
reporter: “I have not killed anyone. The checks I cashed, yes…I used to
be a very good person at one time.”

The Dollhouse of Dorothea Puente

Dorothea Puente wore a blue dress and
pearl necklace when she pleaded innocent to the nine counts of murder
filed against her at the Sacramento Municipal Court on March 31, 1989.

Another four years would pass before all
the evidence was sifted through and her trial began in February, 1993.
Because of the extensive pretrial publicity, the venue was moved from
Sacramento to Monterey , and it took three months to empanel the jury
of eight men and four women.

Prosecutor John O’Mara was blunt in his
summation of the case. It was a simple matter of predatory greed, he
said: Puente murdered her lodgers to steal their government checks.

Prosecutor John O’Mara

“She wanted people who had no relatives,
no friends, no family: people who, when they’re gone, won’t have others
coming around and asking questions,” O’Mara told the court, according
to the Chronicle .

Her defense team, Peter Vlautin and Kevin
Clymo, contended that the tenants died of natural causes. Puente
didn’t call paramedics to retrieve the bodies, they maintained, because
she was operating the boarding house in violation of her parole, and
didn’t want to get sent back to prison.

Dorothea Puente with lawyers

In his opening statement, Clymo described
Puente as a benevolent soul who selflessly cared for “the dregs of
society, people who had no place else to go,” according to the Bee . He
argued that the money from the tenants barely covered Puente’s
operating expenses. She stole money to cover her expenses, he
suggested, but she was not a killer.

The five month-long trial included 153
witnesses, 3,100 pieces of evidence and a scale model of the Victorian
boarding house, which rested on a table at the front of the court room
like a misplaced dollhouse.

In the courtroom, Puente cultivated her
sweet little granny look to the nines, dressing in flowered frocks and
lacquering her hair into a silky white poof. She managed to keep her
poker face during the most damning testimony, but dashed off frequent
notes to her attorneys.

When the prosecution showed photos of
Puente’s alleged victims – first alive and smiling, then rotting in the
garden — Puente gazed at the images through her thick glasses without
flinching, USA Today reported.

Sleeping Pills

The prosecution’s main weakness was the
fact that there were no eyewitnesses to the alleged murders. The
prosecution could only prove the cause of death in the case of Ruth
Munroe – the other bodies were too decayed. But one thing toxicology
tests did reveal, however, was that there were traces of Dalmane
(flurazepam) – a prescription-strength sleeping pill — in all the
remains.

Dalmane can be lethal, especially when
taken with alcohol or other sedatives, and it’s particularly potent in
elderly people, experts testified. At Puente’s preliminary hearing, a
doctor testified that Puente had used Dorothy Miller’s veteran ID card
to try to get a prescription for Dalmane, which the doctor refused to
give her.

The Dalmane evidence was backed up by
testimony about boarders who complained that Puente foisted medication
on them. Puente had abundant sources for the drug, Wood writes. In
addition to the Dalmane she acquired from her court-appointed
psychiatrist, she got it from two other doctors as well.

Former resident Carol Durning, who lived
at the rooming house for the first half of 1987 before she was evicted,
testified that she’d overheard Puente telling James Gallop he had to
leave unless he let her take charge of his money. He later complained
that Puente was giving him drugs that made him sleep all the time, she
added, according to the Bee .

Alvaro “Bert” Montoya complained to an
employee of a local detox center where he resided before transferring
to 1426 F Street that Puente was “giving him a medicine he didn’t like
to take,” according to the Bee .

When that employee, William Johnson,
confronted Puente about the matter, she flew into a rage and asked him
to take Montoya back to the detox center to live if he was going to
meddle in her business. Johnson advised Montoya that he’d be better off
at the boarding house than at the center.

“I told him, ‘You’ll be safe here,’” Johnson told the court. “I was wrong…I’ve got to live with this for the rest of my life.”

Puente went to elaborate lengths to cover
up Montoya’s death. She paid Donald Anthony, a local halfway house
resident, to help her flush out her story. Anthony called Montoya’s
social worker, posing as his brother-in-law, told her that Montoya had
gone to live with his family out of state.

But in a message left on the social
worker’s answering machine, Anthony mistakenly used his own name
instead of the brother-in-law’s – the blunder which prompted Detective
Cabrera’s visit to the boarding house, and the subsequent excavation of
the yard.

Frigid Heart

A handwriting expert confirmed that
Puente had signed the names of seven dead tenants on 60 federal and
state checks that were sent to 1426 F Street in 1987 and 1988,
Sacramento Bee reported. She was making $5,000 a month from the
forgeries.

Dorothea Puente forged signatures

(The prosecution decided not to charge
Puente with forgery, saying they thought the additional charge would
make the case too complex for jurors.)

Her defense attorney Kevin Clymo conceded
that “Puente had a touch of larceny in her heart,” but insisted that,
“it doesn’t make her a killer; it doesn’t make her an evil, serial
killer.”

Dorothea Puente in court

The prosecution brought forth witnesses
to refute this argument, including the handyman Puente hired to build
Everson Gillmouth’s coffin. He told the court that he’d helped her dump
Gillmouth’s body by the Sacramento River . Authorities were not able
to file charges against him because the statute of limitations on the
crime had expired, but his testimony gave jurors a glimpse into
Puente’s frigid heart.

Former residents also came forward.

Homer Myers, who lived at Puente’s place
for two years after she found him in a bar, said he unwittingly dug
some of the tenants’ graves, according to the Los Angeles Times .
Puente told him to dig a 4-foot hole for a small apricot tree, and he
wondered why she’d wanted it so deep.

Things got rough when he refused to sign documents empowering the mistress of the house to cash his social security checks.

“I just never signed them,” he told the paper. “I just passed it off.”

His refusal may have saved his life.

Dorothea Puente is Guilty

Six years after the bodies were
discovered in Puente’s yard, six jurors traveled to Sacramento to visit
the crime scenes they’d only known from pictures or verbal
descriptions during the trial, the Sacramento Bee reported.

They sat in the dive bars where she
trolled for victims, toured the narrow rooms of the Victorian home
where several boarders were given sleeping pill cocktails before they
slowly slipped from unconsciousness to death, and walked over the
garden where Puente had planted flowers over their corpses.

Dorothea Puente’s rose garden

Dusk was spreading gloomily over the backyard when juror Joe Martin rushed back into the house, visibly shaken.

“You can’t see much back there,” he told the paper. “But you feel a lot. It’s weird.”

After a year of weighing the testimony,
the jury found Puente guilty of murdering Dorothy Miller, Benjamin Fink
and Leona Carpenter.

But the jury couldn’t reach a verdict on
the six other murder charges, and Superior Court Judge Michael Virga
declared a mistrial on those counts, according to the Los Angeles
Times. There was no explanation why the jury found Puente guilty on the
three counts but could not reach an agreement on the other charges,
which were similar.

Benjamin Fink

Dorothea Puente hears verdict

Puente showed no emotion when the verdict was read.

On December 10, 1993, Virga sentenced
Puente to prison for life without the possibility of parole. Puente was
64 when she was sent to Central California Women’s Facility near
Chowchilla, the largest women’s prison in the country.